Mistakes: The Shadow Capital for Learning

Adamantios Koumpis

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We all make mistakes – we understand that this is natural, this is normal, this is human. However, there is a culture that on the one hand encourages us to admit mistakes, while on the other hand punishes us for mistakes we made. How long should we pay for our mistakes? And what if mistakes are not debts to pay but our shadow capital that can help and eventually lead us to future successes?

Mistakes comprise an essential part of any human activity and though in the scientific and research bibliography of several disciplines (psychology, education, management etc.) one can read much about their various patterns of occurrence and the impact these may have in human learning, I personally tend to converge to the opinion that there are two main ways of learning: we either learn from other people’s mistakes, or, bitterly, we learn from our own mistakes.

On mistakes, there is a wide grey scale area or a broad gamut of what makes something become a mistake; mistakes aren’t digital, they are rather analog i.e. in many cases the difference between a successful move or decision and a bad one are within a hair’s breadth and the thin red line between them is moving: what today can save you and make a legend out of you may tomorrow be the worst decision you ever made in business or in life.

Engagement between Corporate L&D and Education Sectors

Bruce Cronquist, Todd Stone, and Suzanne Walsh

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What do Corporate Learning and non-profit Educational institutions have to learn from each other? A lot! While both sectors deal with a lack of resources, corporations are ahead in some areas and Education is ahead in other areas. Why don’t we see sharing happen more often? The presenters, Dell L&D employees, volunteer their time to help Bennett College, a historically black college (HBCU), make its digital transformation.

In this case study, you’ll learn the benefits to industry engaging with educational institutions, including helping the college gather learner data through the use of Design Thinking; helping the college identify learner needs; creating Learner Needs Analyses using Task Based Learning (TBL); breaking down large training topics into more impactful succinct micro learning through TBL; employing online learning best practices; and providing real-world tried and tested advice. Colleges can help corporations practice their L&D skills on a different learner population than their daily audience, and understand the theories behind the application of learning. Through this we learned lessons that may apply to engagements between industry and non-profits. A few examples are:

• How to make the connection
• Identifying training goals
• Justifying the engagement with leadership
• Working with dated technology.

We’ll cap the presentation off with best practices that allowed each of us to share our expertise, the challenges we encountered, and how to make these types of engagements successful.

Using Online Simulations to Explore Complex Topics and Apply Systems Thinking

Shelby Marshall

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In this session, we will consider ways in which online simulations can support and extend learning in higher education and corporate training, and we will explore examples at different levels of complexity that have been developed by FableVision Studios, an educational media developer in Boston, MA. Examples will include a simplified climate model developed for the Smithsonian Science Education Center; a decision simulation, designed to give undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to apply soft skills such as empathy, judgment, and ethical practices; and a set of multiplayer interactive experiments for college students that demonstrate how economic markets behave. Although the design of these simulations draws upon research, the workshop’s focus is practical, with the intention of providing participants with concrete ideas that can inform their own plans for development of useful educational resources.

Mindfulness Intervention Courses in STEM Education:a Qualitative Assessment

Eunmi Kim, Cheonwoo Moon, Sangseong Kim, Erva Ozkan and Tim Lomas

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Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been applied in many contexts, including educational sectors such as K-12 and various graduate schools, such as medical and law schools. Research shows that highly competitive students are likely to benefit from mindfulness practices. However, few STEM-focused colleges have been able to assess its value and apply mindfulness practices. This study presents a case report of an MBI course offered by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). We devised eight questions in three categories to investigate how each individual experiences the MBI course, how they enjoy the academic course, and the suitability of the MBI curriculum in STEM education. Qualitative assessments of feedback featuring eight questions and answers were analyzed using grounded theory. The results demonstrate three central phenomena: a) gradual changes and development in students' emotional intelligence, b) development in physical awareness, and c) enhanced sense of joy during the session. These results imply that even during the COVID-19 pandemic, international students being isolated in their home countries and taking the course online would likely still benefit from the intrinsic effect of MBIs. It also implies that MBI courses should be offered as mandatory classes for all KAIST students, where feasible. Nevertheless, further research is needed to fully explore the impact of such programs, both online and offline, including the use of self-report scales of common measures of mental health to contribute empirical data to the literature.

A Digital Mindset for the Society 5.0: Experience an Online Escape Room

Fernando Salvetti, Barbara Bertagni, Roxane Gardner and Cristiano Galli

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This proposal is about an intructional design approach and a training model developed in order to foster an agile mindset for the digital society we’re living in. The key message is this: Digital transformation is first of all about mindset.

The key-question is this: What are the essential elements that we need to know to foster a digital mindset within companies and other organizations, governments, schools, museums, hospitals?

After a short introduction, people attending The Learning Ideas Conference will be invited to join an online escape room where they are expected to be involved in challenging activities by the instructors (Roxane Gardner, PhD and Rebecca Minehart, PhD—both from the Harvard Center for Medical Simulation—together with Barbara Bertagni, PhD and Fernando Salvetti, PhD—both from Logosnet—and Cristiano Galli from the Air Defense Institute of the Emirati Air Force) to perform lively an interactive exercise aimed at sharing key-knowledge about Industry 4.0 and the digital revolution, Society 5.0, telemedicine and virtual healthcare, cybercrime, artificial intelligence and cooperative robots, big data visualization and interpretation, Blockchain.

The online escape room activities will be based on our experiences from online programs at the Harvard Center for Medical Simulation, Italian and Emirati Air Forces, Global Thinkers Forum in London, World Economic Forum & ENI, Cattolica Assicurazioni, FCA-COMAU Robotics Italy and US, RSE Milan, Polytechnic School of Milan, Quadrifor Italy and Rome’s Zoological Museum.

Career-Oriented Learning Experience Design: A Case Study

Yali Chen

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The rapidly changing landscape of work brings challenges to curriculum design in equipping students with the needed skill sets to be successful in the real world. Springboard is a leading company in building career-oriented content to support learners’ professional development. In this proposal, I introduce the curriculum design techniques and outcomes at Springboard, with a focus on data-related education and job preparation.

Our learning experience design approach is career-oriented, meaning we integrate the latest industry skill sets into the curriculum, through curated third-party content as well as in-house created projects. This enables us to launch courses and iterate as the industry evolves quickly. In the past two years, I have been leading the curriculum design in the Data Science track, from Data Analytics, Data Science, to Data Engineering. The ultimate goal is to help Springboard build a School of Data that offers a holistic growing path for Data professionals.

The course design process is outcome-driven and can be divided into 3 phases. Phase 1 is to interview and research extensively with experts in the industry, e.g. Data Scientists in tech companies, to build a skill map that clearly indicates what skillsets are mandatory and what levels are needed in the industry. Phase 2 is to design the outline with Subject Matter Experts and plan out how to best represent the skillsets in the curriculum, e.g. curated content or in-house created projects. Phase 3 is to design the curriculum with actual implementations. The curriculum is heavily composed of project-based learning (>50%) such as case studies and capstones, which can be valuable portfolios for job screening and interviews. During the 6-9 months of learning, students are paired with mentors from the industry, to get 1:1 support on a weekly basis. The combination of a career-oriented, project-based, mentor-led learning experience, helps students to make the transition successfully and eventually land jobs in the market.

Designing Technology to Support Self-Regulated Learning

Jennifer Murphy and Chad Udell

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Self-regulated learning is a process by which learners plan, organize, and assess their own learning experiences. Research shows engaging in self-regulated learning leads to more effective outcomes. However, this process isn’t intuitive, and learners need support to use these strategies. What strategies and tools do your learners need, and where do you find them? In this presentation, we’ll introduce you to the science behind self-regulated learning and break down the different stages in the process, from preparing to executing to assessing. Then, we’ll talk about the challenges your learners might face every step of the way. We’ll discuss how learning technology can support self-regulated learning, and what functions and features you should look for in a solution for your learners.

Humanity in Technology: A New Metaphor for Cooperative Interaction among People

Luca Torri

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AI will lead to a completely new technological world bringing with it a strong risk to create a new digital gap, no longer based on lack of information access but on the inability to manage and understand the digital world.

The risk is the excess of trust in this new scenario: attracted by digital honeypots, people could embrace technology without understanding it. The challenge now is to be able to handle this technological impact without creating a new form of distance with people. We have to understand the shape of this world and whether it will be worthwhile or not for people.

Quantum computing will create new scenarios and, if the track is free, the fragmentation of research orientations will be polarized from the engineering side and towards the technological approach alone, because technology is led by people who have faith only in technology itself and speak only tech language.

Alongside the huge investments in digital technology, it is therefore essential to invest in the development of critical thinking that encourages an overall rethinking of the social role of technology, an hybrid thinking that brings balance between divergent ones: the technological culture and humanistic culture. We have to assign a semantic value to this approach in order to create a new center of thinking, an alternative model, based on education to complexity. Humanists who lead technology, technologists who contribute to the construction of a new way of thinking.

At the moment there are no humanities in technology: we have to link these worlds, technology/science and humanities, in a new educational approach.
The Innovation Park is a place for hybridization of knowledge and skills between companies, research centers, universities, public/private sector, for contamination between humanistic, scientific and technological knowledge, therefore it would be the perfect place to start this educational approach.

Characteristics of Video Consumption on Mobile Devices in a Global Enterprise MOOC Context

Max Bothe and Florian Schwerer

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Since the introduction of the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in 2012, MOOC platforms have continuously refined their offering. New features and functionalities have been added to enhance the learning experience, and flexibility has been increased by complementing the platform offering with mobile applications - i.e., providing access to learning material for online and offline consumption. By these means, learners are no longer tied to a single designated learning place. This is of special interest in the context of professional development, particularly in dynamic working environments, where employees have to learn on their own schedule and can learn on the go. Nevertheless, the characteristics and the behavior of this group of learners using mobile applications in MOOCs, how and in which context they are accessing learning resources, has not yet been subject to major research. In this study, the video consumption on an Enterprise MOOC platform with mobile devices is analyzed, as videos are the main medium used for information transfer in MOOCs. Although these devices are omnipresent in our daily lives, usage patterns differ between cultures and regions. Because of this, region-specific characteristics, as well as mobile-device specific features like network restrictions and downloading capabilities, are considered. This paper broadens the understanding of how mobile devices are utilized for learning activities in a global enterprise context and outlines possible future directions that enhance the mobile learning experience in a MOOC environment. The findings of this study are based on the learner behavior on openSAP, SAP's free of charge Enterprise and Corporate MOOC platform.

It's Time to Shift Our Perspectives: From Teaching How to Enabling Doing

Hal Christensen

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Up-front training courses, our traditional way of getting workers up and running on new tasks and responsibilities, are no longer practical in our current ever-changing work environment. Our workers need a quick path to competent performance, but our Learn Now--Do Later model forces them to spend hours in courses before they can even begin to do the task. Only to waste additional time back on the job because they have forgotten much of what they learned.

Is there a way to immerse novice workers in performing new tasks without their first spending unproductive time trying to learn and later recall how? Is there a Do Now-Learn Now model that will shift our goal to directly enabling workers to do the task--which is what we, our organizations, and our workers really want--rather than indirectly teaching them how?

Actually, we do have such a model. If you have ever used a recipe to prepare a dish you’ve never made before for your dinner that evening, you’ve already experienced it. Recipes are designed for Day-One Performance, to enable successful performance when there is no time or opportunity for prior training. And, they work. The recipe guides you through the workflow of the job, and everything you need to know is embedded in that flow. You do learn how, but you learn it as you do it.

But how do we go from Julia Child’s recipe for beef bourguignon to today’s workplace? In this session, we will explore:
- The key structural elements that make recipes successful at enabling successful performance without prior training..
- How you can easily augment a job recipe with all of the vast resources of the Web and the power of small, single-purpose apps.
- How you can quickly create your augmented job recipes with technology you already have.

Integrating Academic and Non-Academic Online Courses: A University Perspective

Sigrid Schefer-Wenzl and Miladinovic Igor

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Mobile learning, as an emerging didactic method in higher education, has the potential to individualize, personalize, and optimize learning processes. Students are able to learn, collaborate, and share ideas among each other anywhere and anytime with the aid of mobile devices. This requires a high degree of students’ autonomy and self-organization and may lead to a significant fragmentation of the learning process.

In summer semester 2020, the global pandemic forced us to change the mode of all our courses from on-site to online, within a couple of days. To cope with this challenge, we developed a new course design for our course Mobile App Development by systematically integrating some learning elements from a well-known commercial online course provider. We combined these integrated elements with a mobile learning based mix of several didactic methods, including virtual coaching, peer teaching, and learning diaries, to support students’ self-organisation and learning progress.

Our findings after implementation of this concept are twofold. First, we were able to focus more on the individual learning process instead of preparation and adaption of learning contents. Second, more students were able to reach our learning objectives compared to previous years. Therefore, we will continue to teach with the approach of partly integrating contents from online course providers into university courses.

In this presentation, we will introduce our concept and discuss our findings as well as future work.

GEAR UP: A Resilience and Psychological Wellbeing Virtual Training Toolkit for New Employees in Content Operations

Aparna Samuel Balasundaram

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Globally, COVID and WFH became the backdrop against which organizations needed to re-evaluate their people learning needs and training methodology. At WIPRO (India-headquartered global IT, consulting, and business solutions company) we proactively embraced this need to be more agile and innovative with an increased focus on people wellbeing while still maintaining business needs.

One such glaring necessity was our entry level new hires in the content operation space. Content operation is a relatively new skill set, where a person takes the role of a digital guardian as they process large volumes of content across digital channels. They review digital content to ensure that inappropriate content is filtered out. This requires employees to possess and build healthy cognitive thinking patterns and emotional resilience to handle material that might be unpleasant.

We had over 900 new employees who onboarded virtually during this unprecedented global uncertainty. Recognizing this unique need, we designed a virtual resilience building toolkit called GEAR UP, with the objective to empower our new hires to invest in their wellbeing even before they started work. It prepared and geared them for what was to come.

A participatory approach was incorporated to inform the development of this toolkit, using focus group discussions. We implemented a pre and post KAB survey (knowledge- attitude- belief) and feedback surveys, which evidenced that this innovative e-training had a positive impact. We trained these new hires across different geographies over a span of six months.

This presentation will share an overview of this e-training, key learnings, challenges, limitations as well as potential next steps. It will also include an experiential section, where we will demonstrate two resilience building practices that formed the GEAR UP toolkit created for the content operation space

Trouble Implementing Your VR Training Innovation?

Rudi Dullens

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You just received the latest version of your VR demonstrator you have been developing for (part) task training in your organization and realize that the training procedures have changed due to regulation or simply because they do. To have your VR training adjusted, the whole Software Development Lifecycle Process starts over again. In other words, you need programmers and 3D engineers to change your product to regain its value.

But, what if...

What if you can alter scenarios, change game-flow, add randomization, translate your training, determine scoring and add gamification, without any specialized programming skills? My expertise relates to the development of Virtual Maintenance Trainers for aerospace and ground crew. The availability of physical training devices is limited due to cost, availability of training assets and a safe training environment and these limitations can only be overcome using virtual ways of training. But changing the training content requires specialized knowledge and complex IT structures and deployment procedures. In my talk I will discuss various ways of adding flexibility to your Virtual Training Devices by splitting the actual learning content (knowledge) from the asset (virtual representation of the real-world device/environment) by design. Also, I'll be demonstrating the power of this flexibility during the talk (live demo), playing a part of a simulation, changing it and playing it again.

By separating the virtual asset from the content and providing easy WYSIWYG tools for scenario editing the virtual training tool becomes a real valuable asset in the training environment and can be applied not only in the area it was designed for, but can easily be expanded to other areas by simply adding or altering scenarios. By adding gamification elements such as scoring, timing, hinting, and tricking the player into making mistakes to learn from the value raises even more.

Currently the unique and independent approach of creating flexible virtual training environments and serious games for practical training is under investigation by various scientific researchers, investigating the effectiveness of (1) the virtual training environment compared to traditional ways of training and (2) the built in Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, measuring the trainee's knowledge degradation over time. (note: the results of this scientific research are already promising and will be available before the conference starts).

Deploying “Experience in-a-box” – Online Simulations that build resilience and judgement for better decisions and leadership

Ken Spero

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To be a great leader, at any level, certainly skills are essential, but what is often missing, is Experience. Experience implies the ability to use ethical and compassionate judgment in even the most complex situations and to have the Resilience to handle the associated blowback that is sure to follow their decisions. Character is built in those circumstances where we make difficult decisions in messy situations with outcomes that are, at best, uncertain. We know Experience is the Best Teacher, but we would frown upon a surgeon who practices on her patients. Like a Flight Simulator, Simulations enable participants to gain realistic Experience without putting anyone in danger. Leaders have the opportunity to gain critical experience in a risk-free context.

Building Accessible eLearning: Better for Everyone

Garima Gupta

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We all know building accessible courses is the right thing (and the law). Often developers think this means losing interactivity options in their courses. Many times, we’ve seen this requirement met through a downloadable pdf of the course – making for a non-equitable accessible learning experience. In our quest for creating an equal-experience accessible course, our team developed many best practices, and worked with Articulate support team to uncover two major bugs in Storyline. Now, you can build fully accessible course in Storyline. Get the basics right from the start, and save yourself immense amounts of time fixing items later. Create all sorts of accessible interactions, and delight ALL your learners.

Learning Outcomes: 1. Various types of accessibility requirements and which ones are critical to eLearning development 2. How to incorporate key elements of accessibility such as colour contrast, tab order, transcription etc. in your design workflow. 3. Tools and resources that can make accessible development easier for you

Empowering Collaboration in Asynchronous Problem-Based Learning

Domi Enders and Cassandra Scannella

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This presentation will focus on the student learning experience in two brand new asynchronous programs at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies. The pedagogical framework for both programs is Problem-Based Learning (PBL). We will be exploring this topic from three different interconnected perspectives: instructional design, educational technology, and student data insights.

We will share how we have leveraged these three perspectives to explore and implement design and technology solutions that empower collaboration by enabling rich synchronous and asynchronous interactions, optimizing group dynamics, and facilitating both peer-to-peer and individual reflection.

Topics covered in the presentation will include: 1) How we at Columbia SPS design and deliver Problem Based Learning in asynchronous Master’s level programs; 2) How we design and facilitate effective and meaningful interactions between students and faculty; 3) How we shape the collaboration between designers, faculty, administrators and education technologists supporting the PBL; 4) How we leverage student data insights to facilitate iterative teaching practice, instructional design, and educational technology implementation.

How to Design Compliance Training that Is Engaging for Frontline Workers

Lucia Stejer

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As the largest provider of compliance training in the Australian financial services sector, Kaplan Professional Education embarked on its vision in e-learning to improve the quality of training courses. We initiated the Tier 2 project with the goal to increase the quality of our compliance training as measured by feedback from bank employers and students. To date, the Tier 2 Accreditation course has been completed by over 25,000 students in all the major banks and insurance companies in Australia. Our project success is measured by the feedback that the course materials are engaging and relevant to compliance accreditation in the Australian financial services industry.

Our success story provides a valuable case study in the stakeholder engagement and project management of instructional design and delivery of e-learning content in a business-to-business context.

THE PROJECT TO TRANSITION WITH E-LEARNING

Kaplan developed an e-learning course to replace the existing Tier 2 compliance training. The project established four main objectives. To develop an e-learning course which was fully online. To provide the required accreditation outcomes. To integrate the training within an induction program. To position the relevance of learning in call centre and bank teller environments.

The project management plan focused on engaging employers and students in focus groups to elicit scope requirements. Conclusions from the focus groups then informed the priorities for e-learning development in our project teams in curriculum, business development and marketing.

The features of the Tier 2 Accreditation course include: WCAG accessibility to cater for students with diverse needs; narrative based on the Romeo and Juliet story to cross-link e-learning modules; presentation with real-life characters; interactive formative activities; printable resources and targeted assessments. The project created an engaging e-learning environment in which students can take on the role of a customer liaison officer at a fictional general insurance and banking business. Within the role, students are presented with realistic tasks to develop their knowledge and skills expected in workplace practice. Hence, students with diverse needs and learning preferences are prepared for assessment at the end of each e-learning module.

Teaching Students Science Through Computational Model Building and Simulation Design and Experimentation

Tomas Helikar

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Much attention has been given to the emerging core concepts (Brownell et al. 2014; Smith et al. 2019). While broad consensus on the value of core competencies, such as systems modeling and simulation, has been reached, integration into undergraduate coursework has proven challenging in some areas. Cell Collective (https://cellcollective.org) is a web-based, research-grade modeling platform adapted to engage students in creating and simulating dynamic models of biological processes. The use of modeling and simulation emphasizes higher-order cognitive skills, positioning students to be critical and reflective thinkers proficient in problem-solving and effective communication (Guy-Gaytán et al. 2019; King et al. 2019). In this workshop, participants will experience, as a student, how to build a dynamic computational model. That model will then be used to simulate the behaviors of the system. Comparing the behavior of the system under varied conditions helps students gain insight into the mechanism of the phenomenon. Participants will gain confidence and experience in computational modeling which can be leveraged in their courses through self-contained, guided exercises. Cell Collective has more than 20 lessons suitable for introductory through upper-level classes, and are readily completed in either an in-class or remote setting. .

Learning from Technology or with Technology? Meaningful Learning in Technology-Enhanced Education

Sam Yousefifard

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After the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, online education has gained prominence all over the world. With growth in online teaching and learning practices in educational settings, the efficacy of online instruction and learning has become the center of attention among research scholars and practitioners. While there is a growing body of literature exploring the efficacy of online instruction in technology-enhanced learning environments in secondary STEM education, few studies have been conducted to address meaningful learning with technology in higher education settings. To that end, data from a mixed-methods study that adopted a questionnaire and qualitative data from follow-up interviews were collected. A total of 116 students learning at the undergraduate university level participated in this study and completed the Meaningful Learning with Technology Scale (MeLTS). The scale had nine major components: a) intentional learning (INT), b) cooperative learning (CLO), c) authentic learning (AUT), d) community building for learning (CBL), e) perception of technology as cognitive tools (PCT), f) model building for externalizing thinking (MBE), g) visualizing with technology (UVT), h) experimenting for reflection (EXR) and i) writing for literacy (WRL). Results of the questionnaire and the follow-up interview revealed that most students expressed higher confidence in their ability in visualizing with technology, experimenting for reflection and community building for learning, while they expressed their concerns regarding authentic learning and intentional learning. The findings have significant implications for online higher education programs. Moreover, this study provides guidance for further research in technology integration in online higher education environments with more meaningful learning outcomes.